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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
Luciano Burgazzi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 139 | Number 1 | July 2002 | Pages 3-9
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT139-3-9
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper deals with the reliability assessment of passive systems that have been developed in recent years by suppliers, industries, utilities, and research organizations, aimed at plant safety improvement and substantial simplification in its implementation. The present study concerns the passive decay heat removal systems that use, for the most part, a condenser immersed in a cooling pool. The focus of the paper is a reliability study of the isolation condenser system foreseen for advanced boiling water reactors (BWRs) for the removal of the excess sensible and core decay heat from the BWR by natural circulation. Furthermore, an approach aimed at the thermal-hydraulic performance assessment (i.e., the natural circulation failure evaluation) from the probability point of view is given. The study is not plant-specific-related but pertains to the conceptual design of the foregoing system.
